Steven Pinker Quotes

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

Most conduct is guided by norms rather than by laws. Norms are voluntary and are effective because they are enforced by peer pressure.

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.

I look for the consensus because the consensus drives the policy into new places.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

There are the rules and then there are the ways.

I go not back of the convention, to make distinctions among its’ members.

Culture is this thing that exists apart from our real life but is something we all have tacitly agreed to in America. And what film and television do, particularly in this country, is lay out the characters involved in this invisible agreement and dictate who and what can participate.

I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.

I asked my mother, 'Why shouldn't I act?' She said, 'Nobody in the family has acted, so why should you?'

I'd been brought up in a society which didn't talk about sex, food, money, religion or politics. Those things were all deemed slightly rude.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.

As long as you don't fly openly in the face of society, society doesn't ask any inconvenient questions; and it makes precious short work of the cads who do. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

Dog's owners don't call me. It's their neighbors or family members. We call them the whistleblowers, but it's more like the pack. It's making sure that one pack member gets in line. Before it was the owners, now it's the community.

I thought grandmothers had to like you. It’s a law or something.

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.